Social Media can be an intimidating beast. When you jump off of your favorite personal platform, where all your friends and family are, and dive into marketing; the algorithm growls and the world becomes a much more scary place.
Your friends were always friendly, because they love you, but platform users can sniff your sales pitch from miles away. These new people have different concerns than your friends; they’re really only interested in whatever product/entertainment/satisfaction/fun/wisdom/insight you have to offer. When your offerings don’t trump the last person’s, they disappear like a panther that’s found better prey.
Their attention is fleeting and their desires are fickle. If we’re honest, we’re the same as them. We doom scroll through our favorite video app, rarely purchasing anything, gravitating not towards any truly life-enhancing products that cost more than $24.99, but more towards silly chicken videos and hold my beer or juice box.
As a business, personal brand, or job-seeker, how do we break through all of this?
The answer isn’t modern, it’s age-old wisdom:
1) Your solid product is what really secures sales. It improves lives, makes money, or saves time. Being able to communicate succinctly what that is and its benefits is your powerful launch towards success.
* This is why a few unicorns can survive purely off of their social media content. Their product is their fabulous entertainment as they bring levity and inspiration to their followers. Their content is their product and the platforms reward them for it.
2) A clear and consistent identity builds trust with prospective customers. Branding corrects a hodge-podge of communication so that rather than your audience saying, “well that’s random,” and moving on, your message is reinforced with layers of muscle memory that create comfort and trust around your brand.
* the exception to this is someone who’s especially entertaining or funny. The personality, entertainment, and humor becomes the consistency that forms the brand.
3) Finally, when all this is together then you can create a sales funnel that is truly robust, and you’ll have confidence in your role in the social media jungle.
Sales funnels are classic and unchanging. Know your sales funnel:
a) Awareness
Where are you most natural at sharing your product intially?
How can you best introduce your offering? Is that social media or is that somewhere else?
b) Acquisition
Break down the barriers to purchasing by providing the answers your prospective customers need to buy.
This may be done on social media, or it may be done on your website. Social can be a great place to house more casual content and testimonials that will help your prospective clients identify with you and feel more comfortable with the idea of visiting your website and spending money on your products.
For this reason, numbers of followers aren’t as important as their valid interest in what you’re offering.
c) Securing the Sale
Knowing where your sales will happen helps you streamline your content in that direction. Website, SamCart, Course Platform, and Etsy are just a few places you can secure a sale. For some products the sale can be secured right on a social platform like TikTok. With 1.5 billion active users a month, you could make your sales home just that one platform. It’s not adviseable, though. We’ve seen volitility on all the platforms, and while people flock to sell subscriptions on Substack or soap on TikTok, it’s a stronger strategy to house your own “building” in the digital marketplace. So more than likely, unless you’re a unicorn, you’ll probably want to have your social content pointing somewhere else.
So unless you’re an entertainment unicorn, your social media strategy will work hardest for you if you post with the following purposes:
1) Share regularly updated content which breaks down the barriers to purchase,
2) Adhere to your brand voice and message with proactive consistency,
3) Validate everything you’ve shared in the awareness stage and route your customers towards your point of sale.
Keeping the purpose of your social media in perspective is key to creating a successful strategy.
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